I recently upgraded my homelab storage to a new NAS, and like any good plan, it worked perfectly… right up until it didn’t.
What started as a straightforward data migration turned into a deep dive into Docker, PostgreSQL, and how modern apps actually store data. In the end, I recovered everything—but not before learning a few lessons the hard way.
One of the things I enjoy most about running a homelab is taking random pieces of technology and turning them into something genuinely useful (or at least really cool).
Recently, I set out to build a system that could answer a simple question:
“What aircraft is closest to my house right now?”
That question turned into a full-blown project involving:
Like many people running a homelab, I found myself with a growing collection of self-hosted services—Grafana for monitoring, Uptime Kuma for alerts, Portainer for container management, and more.
Each service worked well on its own, but there was one problem:
every service had its own login.
It wasn’t just inconvenient—it also didn’t scale. Managing users, credentials, and access across multiple applications quickly becomes messy.
I need to brush up on my networking skills, so I thought that I would dig out the old hardware that I purchased back when I initially got my CCNA certification. I figured I’d first start with this ASA Firewall since many job listing I have been seeing for Network Engineer jobs have mentioned firewall configuration. I purchased this ASA in probably 2017 or 2018 and it was past end of life then (foreshadowing…..).